Use this thread to announce plans to write or coordinate tournaments. Posting here doesn't finalize anything, but it will allow us to survey what tournaments are potentially out there. We can start putting events into place once we have had a reasonable amount of time for discussion, collaboration, and coordination here.

Chicago would like to run a Nationals prep tournament in March in the place that has been HI/Sack of Antwerp/Illinois Open. The idea would be to hold it in Chicago on March 3, 2012 and then have mirrors during March depending on people's spring breaks.

Marshall I. Steinbaum

Oxford University (2002-2005)University of Chicago (2008-2014)

"Smart young whippersnapper"--Brad DeLong

FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of President Nixon's reelection and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-Election of the President.--The Washington Post, October 10th, 1972

Tees-Exe Line wrote:Chicago would like to run a Nationals prep tournament in March in the place that has been HI/Sack of Antwerp/Illinois Open. The idea would be to hold it in Chicago on March 3, 2012 and then have mirrors during March depending on people's spring breaks.

This is my opinion, not the club's. Given the above quote and our player turnover, I'm going to see what we're going to do about Illinois Open when we have our final meeting of the year. I, personally, would like to revive MCMNT as a housewrite this coming year.

Charles Martin Jr.University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignAcademic Buzzer Team | PresidentB.S. in Accountancy, August 2011B.S. in Finance, August 2011MAS Program, Class of 2012

So there's a lot still up in the air as to my/Yale's plans for writing next year, but here's what we know so far.

John Lawrence and I (with the probable assistance of Kevin Koai) are interested in writing for a regular-difficulty tournament next year, likely on the end of regular closer to Regionals 2011 or 2007 Deep Bench quads packets. If we all worked on the same project, the Lit, Arts, History, and RMP for a whole tournament would be doable between us, but we would need additional collaboration for the tournament's worth of science and social science which otherwise couldn't exist. Depending on whether other projects need collaborators to be complete and good, it might also be possible that we split so John collaborates on one tournament and I work with another. The question of packet sub or not is still undecided, though we're leaning towards "not." The question of date is also still undecided, though October, late November/early December, and January seem most likely; regardless of date, a large amount of the writing will occur over this upcoming summer.

Penn Bowl will be house-written and head-edited by me next year, and we want to keep the usual end-of-January/early February timeframe. I'm also planning on co-head-editing Minnesota Open with Rob. I'm further interested in finally writing both a myth and a history side event, but that's not as definite yet.

Pending Rob's approval, I want to one-up the naming of MO to the Penn-Minnesota Intergalactic.

Eric Mukherjee Brown University '09Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania '17

"The accumulated filth of all their stupidity and irrationality will foam up about their waists and all the Jehovah’s witnesses refusing blood transfusions, drug-seekers, creationists, new agers, anti-vaccination nutjobs, scientologists, and AIDS deniers will look up and shout ‘save us!’…and I’ll look down, and whisper ‘no’” –Rorschach MD

The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:I'm further interested in finally writing both a myth and a history side event, but that's not as definite yet.

Just to clarify, you mean that you want to write a myth side event and a (separate) history side event, right? I ask because I've been waiting for years for someone to write an all-history side event I could play.

edit: I'm not actually interested in (another) all-history side event. I am very interested in an all-myth side event. I apologize for any confusion caused by my lame attempt at humor.

-Seth

Last edited by setht on Mon Apr 25, 2011 2:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

RyuAqua wrote:So there's a lot still up in the air as to my/Yale's plans for writing next year, but here's what we know so far.

John Lawrence and I (with the probable assistance of Kevin Koai) are interested in writing for a regular-difficulty tournament next year, likely on the end of regular closer to Regionals 2011 or 2007 Deep Bench quads packets. If we all worked on the same project, the Lit, Arts, History, and RMP for a whole tournament would be doable between us, but we would need additional collaboration for the tournament's worth of science and social science which otherwise couldn't exist. Depending on whether other projects need collaborators to be complete and good, it might also be possible that we split so John collaborates on one tournament and I work with another. The question of packet sub or not is still undecided, though we're leaning towards "not." The question of date is also still undecided, though October, late November/early December, and January seem most likely; regardless of date, a large amount of the writing will occur over this upcoming summer.

I can probably volunteer my help with the physics and other science. Get in touch with me when you know what your plans are.

I'm going to be editing a packet submission tournament to run most likely in the late fall. The purpose of the tournament will be to demonstrate that you can write an event that's enjoyable and challenging for anything but CO-level superteams while still being completely playable for pretty much everybody. As such, difficulty may somewhat resemble last year's VCU Open Saturday (perhaps a bit easier). I may end up impressing some wayward science person to help with the math/physics/chemistry, or maybe I'll end up editing those questions too? How exciting! You'll just have to wait and see.

The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:I'm further interested in finally writing both a myth and a history side event, but that's not as definite yet.

Just to clarify, you mean that you want to write a myth side event and a (separate) history side event, right? I ask because I've been waiting for years for someone to write an all-history side event I could play.

-Seth

You are correct in your clarification. It probably will not be Bruce-level gold-seal work, though.

Eric Mukherjee Brown University '09Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania '17

"The accumulated filth of all their stupidity and irrationality will foam up about their waists and all the Jehovah’s witnesses refusing blood transfusions, drug-seekers, creationists, new agers, anti-vaccination nutjobs, scientologists, and AIDS deniers will look up and shout ‘save us!’…and I’ll look down, and whisper ‘no’” –Rorschach MD

DumbJaques wrote:I'm going to be editing a packet submission tournament to run most likely in the late fall. The purpose of the tournament will be to demonstrate that you can write an event that's enjoyable and challenging for anything but CO-level superteams while still being completely playable for pretty much everybody. As such, difficulty may somewhat resemble last year's VCU Open Saturday (perhaps a bit easier). I may end up impressing some wayward science person to help with the math/physics/chemistry, or maybe I'll end up editing those questions too? How exciting! You'll just have to wait and see.

If this is for the fall, yeah, I'd request that this be a bit easier. It looks like we've already got Minnesota Open early on, so adding on an event similar to VCU Open (where a team of you/me/Eric/Dominic got about 19 ppb) seems like it would be pushing it. Last time you mentioned this, I thought you wanted to write a Regionals-level tournament; is this no longer the case, or are you referencing VCU Open in regards to its multitude of hard tossups on easy answers? Anyway, having two hard tournaments in the fall, when there's only one regular difficulty event on the docket so far, seems worrisome.

EDIT: Another thing I just thought of is that what "VCU Open" means to you is not necessarily what it means to the submitting teams. Judging from the Nationals submissions, ours included, if people think they're supposed to be writing for a hard tournament, you'll probably receive a bunch of ridiculously hard packets, which is absolutely not your goal. Maybe announce it as Regionals difficulty and see what you get?

Yeah, you're right about my reference to VCU Open being more about the inclusion of easy answers (or, more accurately, a normal distribution of answers that has "easy" answerlines very well and appropriately represented) - I in no way intend to make this tournament as hard as a summer open event. When I actually put an announcement up, I assure you teams will be explicitly instructed to knock off all of the ludicrous nonsense that we've been seeing more and more of with packet submissions; I know this summary wouldn't help that cause, but, well, it wasn't meant to, it was just a quick and dirty rundown for purposes of claiming an event (it seemed better than saying "mystery difficulty event X"). Assuredly everyone's now been conditioned to expect the worst in terms of people being cavalier about difficulty, but as I hope the actual tournament announcement will demonstrate, my goal in writing this tournament is in fact to move us in the opposite direction.

Since you bring it up though, I had considered simply saying "Regionals difficulty," but honestly I'm not sure what that means to everyone (or if it means one thing, more or less, at all). In terms of difficulty, my event will probably resemble ACF Regionals 2010, though even that had some issues with impossible third parts I'm hesitant to draw comparisons too. Among other ideas, I'm interested in exploring if we can bridge the gap between challenge and accessibility by exploring the bizarrely-absent phenomena of top teams scoring in the 24-25 ppb range. If there's still collective concern, I can only say that I would be very hesitant to recommend something like MO to certain teams/players, whereas my goal is to write a set that, while perhaps not suited to the superest of superteams or the purest novices, would be free of such a distinction.

I'm thoroughly confused about what this Maryland tournament is intended to be so I have no idea if the following comment is aimed at it or not, but one thing I'd like to see become a principle of the scheduling reform initiative is that we need to bring back, around the whole calendar, tournaments that teams just play. By that I mean: not novice, not "10 line tossups and open eligibility and hard answers," just regular old tournaments that we can, in good faith, tell the NC States and Hardings of the world that they need to be playing at. I am utterly unconvinced that we need any more in-season hard events besides ICT, Nationals, and whatever random spring prep event pops up in a given year. I never liked the placement of Minnesota Open in the fall and I sure hope we aren't going to see more precious space taken up by these niche tournaments and the idea of circuit expansion and strength thrown by the wayside.

Maryland intends to produce another incarnation of the (packet-submission) Terrapin Invitational Tournament next year, aiming for a late January-ish date similar to last year and with the same target difficulty as last year. This is in addition to the wild, crazy, and probably quite-reasonable-difficulty-wise tournament planned by Chris Ray for the fall.

Seriously, this tournament is going to be completely accessible to people - that's the point. I'll be using a slightly different metric for how we evaluate difficulty, in that subject matter that might be an "out of place" answer choice for a regular or regionals event will come up in very small quantities. Again, the actual announcement will cover this stuff better, but as much as it's about anything, this tournament will be about filling that gaping hole Matt alludes to between regular tournaments and what "Open" has meant in the last two years or so.

Matt and I may not agree on the productivity of events like these allowing non-students to play, but I suspect we're in total agreement on the schedule already having quite enough events in the vein of IO or MO. I'll be using my oft-espoused "you don't have to be in school to play, but don't form superteams" eligibility standard, meaning that graduates/hsers/hobos are entirely encouraged to play this tournament, but I'll be vetoing any ridiculous, field-busting superteams and schools will be encouraged to play together. I'll also note that it's not a "Maryland tournament" (though I certainly hope MAQT will agree to having it run at Maryland), so nobody on the Maryland team should be blamed for any despair that it engenders.

No, I do not in fact think there is anything good about letting non-students play regular tournaments. To use a ready example, a "no superteams" policy hardly means anything when you, e.g., let Andrew Lim and his ability to get 1-2 tossups per game play with Trevor Davis and make the difference in who wins Terrapin '09. There's a lot of legitimacy and fairness lost by doing things like that, and I'm unclear on what it is that you think is gained. Can you argue for this?

I would like to see the closing of some of these loopholes too. To use a real example, Jerry/Laferbrook/Trevor played Terrapin this year. They were not eligible to win, but their wins/losses counted as part of the overall standings, which impacted the need for a final. (Note, I played on a mixed team at this tournament too!)

Mike Cheyne"He has a PhD in SUBURBAN STUDIES!"--Marshall SteinbaumFormerly at University of MinnesotaHSAPQ Vice-President of Talent Relations

I may be way off base here, but I thought the major concern this past season was the complete nonexistence of regular college tournaments in the fall. Looking at the list at the top, there still only appears to be one, this new UVA thing. I might advocate for more.

Directed towards Chris Ray or anybody else, you should be allowed to write whatever tournament you want, and I mean that. But perhaps if someone is willing and able to write a whole new tournament this coming season, they might consider one that is "regular" and for just-college teams, rather than one that is neither.

Nick wrote:I may be way off base here, but I thought the major concern this past season was the complete nonexistence of regular college tournaments in the fall. Looking at the list at the top, there still only appears to be one, this new UVA thing. I might advocate for more.

Directed towards Chris Ray or anybody else, you should be allowed to write whatever tournament you want, and I mean that. But perhaps if someone is willing and able to write a whole new tournament this coming season, they might consider one that is "regular" and for just-college teams, rather than one that is neither.

Alabama might be interested in doing such a thing, but we need the end of the semester to get here before we start getting serious about preparing such an event. Right now it's just an idea between myself and a few of my teammates. If we do end up writing a tournament, it'll almost certainly be around regular difficulty, or at least that's the current intention.

Nick wrote:I may be way off base here, but I thought the major concern this past season was the complete nonexistence of regular college tournaments in the fall. Looking at the list at the top, there still only appears to be one, this new UVA thing. I might advocate for more.

Directed towards Chris Ray or anybody else, you should be allowed to write whatever tournament you want, and I mean that. But perhaps if someone is willing and able to write a whole new tournament this coming season, they might consider one that is "regular" and for just-college teams, rather than one that is neither.

I agree with Nick. I think it makes good sense to have more no-open-team-exceptions regular difficulty tournaments in the fall. There are an adequate number of tournaments in the spring semester and summer (hell, there's MO in the fall semester too) for open teams to enjoy. It seems that energies for controlling difficulty would be better channeled if we stop trying to accommodate the mass of quizbowlers who've moved on from academia and are (hopefully) in search of greener pastures.

I don't quite understand what's going on here. Let's take it for granted that Terrapin will not be an open tournament, and that this other thing that Chris wants to work on will be (or at least semi-open in the way that Chris says). What is the objection to this, exactly? I don't really see how any legitimacy or whatever is lost provided that the rules are specified ahead of time. I can see the argument that says that this should just be another regular college tournament, which is fine, but if it's going to be an open, what's the problem? We already have several explicitly open tournaments on the docket and no one says that MO or IO should close up shop. Maybe the schedule can't really accommodate another open, but besides that I don't see a reason not to have this.

The objection is as follows: the whole reason we are doing this is that last year, there were no tournaments for most people to play for long stretches of time. If you weren't a novice, and you didn't want to play superhard questions against Jonathan Magin, then you had your choice of, to be very generous about what constitutes "regular difficulty," EFT or THUNDER in the fall. I think there should be much more than 2 tournaments that the average team can play each semester, and I think that putting schedule space and effort towards yet another niche event for me and Jerry to play represents a tremendous investment of opportunity cost in the wrong direction.

So many tournaments this school year were effectively open. Using the midwest as my primary focus, THUNDER featured Seth Teitler, TIT featured Jerry and Laferbrook, Sack of Antwerp was completely open, IO was completely open, MO was completely open. Aside from EFT (which featured a very minor merging of I think Chicago and Michigan teams) and Penn Bowl and the basic ACF/NAQT tournaments, everything else featured very blatant instances of eligibility not really being a factor. I'm not sure how many of these opens we need, to be honest. I don't begrudge anyone from playing a tournament if they are allowed, but I agree with Matt, Gautam, and Nick that we should probably be concentrating more on quizbowl during the regular season for collegiate teams.

Mike Cheyne"He has a PhD in SUBURBAN STUDIES!"--Marshall SteinbaumFormerly at University of MinnesotaHSAPQ Vice-President of Talent Relations

Cheynem wrote:I would like to see the closing of some of these loopholes too. To use a real example, Jerry/Laferbrook/Trevor played Terrapin this year. They were not eligible to win, but their wins/losses counted as part of the overall standings, which impacted the need for a final. (Note, I played on a mixed team at this tournament too!)

Can you just let them play without counting any of their games?

Eric Mukherjee Brown University '09Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania '17

"The accumulated filth of all their stupidity and irrationality will foam up about their waists and all the Jehovah’s witnesses refusing blood transfusions, drug-seekers, creationists, new agers, anti-vaccination nutjobs, scientologists, and AIDS deniers will look up and shout ‘save us!’…and I’ll look down, and whisper ‘no’” –Rorschach MD

Matt Weiner wrote:I guess that would be better than the alternative, but why bother?

People wanna play, I guess. I think we can strike a balance between Jerry's interests and yours.

Eric Mukherjee Brown University '09Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania '17

"The accumulated filth of all their stupidity and irrationality will foam up about their waists and all the Jehovah’s witnesses refusing blood transfusions, drug-seekers, creationists, new agers, anti-vaccination nutjobs, scientologists, and AIDS deniers will look up and shout ‘save us!’…and I’ll look down, and whisper ‘no’” –Rorschach MD

I think there should be much more than 2 tournaments that the average team can play each semester, and I think that putting schedule space and effort towards yet another niche event for me and Jerry to play represents a tremendous investment of opportunity cost in the wrong direction.

I think Matt's conflating two distinct issues here. I can't imagine that anyone would argue that we need to add even more events whose difficulty and nature are on par with last year's MO/IO. And yeah, last year's situation in which we had EFT and Thunder as the only regular events before late January was a definite problem, and what I see as one of the biggest reasons to put this schedule together. I don't think those things are really being argued for by anybody here.

That's not at all the same as the question of whether Andrew should be allowed to hop on an undermanned team at a regular-regionals difficulty event, and I'm not sure why Matt seems to imply that it is. For what it's worth, I think there are reasonable arguments to be made either way on that issue and see where Matt is coming from, but I think it's counter-productive to act like allowing Seth Teitler to play solo at a tournament like Thunder is somehow keeping us from selling quizbowl to the masses or encouraging semi-involved teams to become regulars. Those are fundamental goals we should all be working toward, and I absolutely agree that a lack of events with a difficulty in between novice and IO is a huge obstacle to them. But it's not like these teams are being kept away by the fact that one of the half dozen squads that finishes higher than them happens to be a non-student playing solo.

I continue to see no problem with employing the no superteams standards for a lot of events, though that doesn't mean I think Penn Bowl or Thunder or the UVA event need to do so. I acknowledge this stance might be in error, but I flat out reject that it's somehow inflicting the same kind of damage as not having sets that are accessible. And for like the bazillionth time, my tournament will NOT BE A NICHE EVENT FOR PEOPLE LIKE MATT OR JERRY. It's designed to be something everyone can play; players like Jerry won't be thrilled by a barrage of experimental shenanigans, and semi-active teams won't be staring blankly at the questions because they will be accessible. If they happen to encounter Jonathan Magin, he won't be playing on a superteam and probably won't beat them as badly as Yale or UVA or Harvard or any of the other top teams. I'm not sure why this scenario is somehow a threat to quizbowl, or why a new event that isn't taking any effort away from the usual slate of tournaments is suddenly part of what keeps Duke from showing up to stuff or whatever.

I'm not in the heads of less active teams, though I have lots and lots of experience with new teams as well as new players on teams I'm involved in, and it seems to me that it is, in fact, a problem to have non-students play because it delegitimizes the event. If you lose by 500 to UVa, it's very easy to say "UVa is another college team that is better than you and if you want to get as good as them I'll show you how." If you lose by 500 to Jonathan, what do you say? I'm looking to do a lot of evangelizing for the idea of "college quizbowl teams need to play college quizbowl tournaments" next year and I just don't see myself being able, in good faith, to call an event with open eligibility a "college quizbowl tournament" that NC State and Harding are obligated to play. There are other issues with professionalism and taking ourselves seriously in college quizbowl but in my opinion this is by far the biggest one.

I agree strongly with Matt's last post. I think quizbowl already has a lot of the characteristics of a Good Ol' Boys Club and mandating more regular just-college tournaments and less of anything else, would help push quizbowl away from that paradigm and closer to an interscholastic competition. Which, I guess, is what I think it should be.

For those who want another regular tournament in the fall, I guess I'll announce now that John's and my project will be ready in the fall and we would like to host our site on the first Saturday of December. It is non-packet sub. We are still looking for collaborators in several areas, as will be detailed in the collaboration thread.

I don't have any problems with this or that particular event being non-open. Mike rightly pointed out that a lot of events last year were de facto opens and if people want to close that loophole, I have no objections. I do have objections to what I see as the trend of the open being eliminated (except for summer tournaments) altogether. I think those events have a valuable place in the schedule. I don't believe that there's anything wrong with MO or IO existing and I also don't think there's anything wrong with some sort of Maryland open existing either, provided the other tournaments are made officially college-only. Most tournaments are not for you to come to and be beaten by 500 points by Jonathan Magin; a few tournaments are, and I think they have a legitimate claim to existence.

I agree with Jerry that a few opens during the year are a good idea; that said, players like me who aren't in college and still enjoy playing have plenty of tournaments to play (MO, IO, everything in the summer, random side events, probably some things I'm missing), and I think it's more pragmatic to ensure that the vast majority of college tournaments are for college teams, not open teams.

Also, I wouldn't really enjoy a tournament where I would end up somehow beating a slew of inexperienced teams by 500 playing solo, and I suspect most other open players feel similarly. I appreciate people writing tournaments that I can play, but I don't think we really need more events with a focus on experienced/open players, which most open events end up having, even if they don't intend on having that focus.

but I don't think we really need more events with a focus on experienced/open players, which most open events end up having, even if they don't intend on having that focus.

Couldn't we just stop making every open event into difficulty clusterfucks where everyone is bludgeoned to death with the Watkins Pole? I mean, that's what I'm trying to do, and addressing the lack of regular season events/rampant openification concerns seems like a separate goal. I agree we don't need more events focused on super-experienced open players at the expense of everyone else, but I just as strongly reject the binary choice between that route and refusing to allow them to compete in field-sensible ways.

I'll let Jonathan clarify, but I wonder if what he's really getting at is the lamentable reality that in the past few years, anytime anyone has written an event that's labeled "open," it nearly always ended up abusing even the top teams and being utterly inaccessible to less-experienced squads. That's bad! But even here, I doubt that the tournaments in question being declared "opens" is really the culprit; Penn Bowl wasn't open this year, and it was pretty darn hard. If the presence of a couple of people playing a given set actually changes how the editors go about writing it, I'd say that's a much bigger problem than what we're considering here.

To rephrase, let's say you find yourself putting together a tournament and thinking "oh, but Jonathan/Jerry/anyone else (in school or not) is playing this tournament, I better change this tossup on The Birthmark into one on Feathertop." STOP DOING THAT. It's bad, and honestly it's probably a big part of the reason why people have concerns about non-ironclad eligibility restrictions leading to ridiculous sets that won't play for most of the community.

I am confused about what exactly is "the valuable place in the schedule" for open tournaments. What benefits do these tournaments bring? I really enjoyed Minnesota Open, but I have no idea what the benefits of the tournament are per se, other than I guess being a fun outlet for people still involved in the game (which I guess is a benefit?).

I would strongly like to see eligibility loopholes plugged for non open tournaments. It's one thing I guess for schools to merge teams to make a field better or for a player not in school to play as some sort of exhibition team to avoid byes.

Mike Cheyne"He has a PhD in SUBURBAN STUDIES!"--Marshall SteinbaumFormerly at University of MinnesotaHSAPQ Vice-President of Talent Relations

What are the benefits of any tournament at all other than giving people the opportunity to play quizbowl?

Needless to say Mike's logic is taking us exactly where I predict it will take us: the elimination of open tournaments from the regular season. As I've already stated, this is an outcome that I'm completely opposed to, for the simple reason that as a contributing member of the community I think it's not too much to ask to be allowed to actually be a tournament participant a few times a year. It doesn't have to be many; there can be 10 tournaments in which NC State will never have to see me unless I show up to staff, and there can be 2 or 3 tournaments where that wouldn't be the case.

I'm on board with most of these scheduling reforms, up to and including making the overwhelming majority of regular-season tournaments closed to non-school teams. I am not on board with the elimination of opens altogether, which is very obviously the position being advanced by several people in this thread.

Well, many tournaments have the benefits of promoting a strong collegiate circuit, retention of new players/new teams, etc.

I am sympathetic to the idea that contributing members of the quizbowl community should be allowed to play a few tournaments. This is one reason why every summer tournament is open. I guess I am okay with like 1-2 open tournaments during the school year. But the talk of a Minnesota Open, an Illinois Open (is this actually happening?), a Chicago "hard" tournament which if is like Sack of Antwerp is open, and this "Maryland Open" is way too much. We cannot keep producing these open sets while seeing ripple effects on the collegiate circuit.

Mike Cheyne"He has a PhD in SUBURBAN STUDIES!"--Marshall SteinbaumFormerly at University of MinnesotaHSAPQ Vice-President of Talent Relations

Cheynem wrote:Well, many tournaments have the benefits of promoting a strong collegiate circuit, retention of new players/new teams, etc.

I am sympathetic to the idea that contributing members of the quizbowl community should be allowed to play a few tournaments. This is one reason why every summer tournament is open. I guess I am okay with like 1-2 open tournaments during the school year. But the talk of a Minnesota Open, an Illinois Open (is this actually happening?), a Chicago "hard" tournament which if is like Sack of Antwerp is open, and this "Maryland Open" is way too much. We cannot keep producing these open sets while seeing ripple effects on the collegiate circuit.

I actually disagree with this logic; it used to be the case that many tournaments were open and if they really did have the deleterious effect people claim, no one would play quizbowl today. Instead, exactly the opposite is true. I hypothesize that the amount of opens really has no bearing whatsoever on collegiate circuit strength or player retention or anything else of relevance, but I'm perfectly happy to yield on these points because having every tournament be open is not a hill I particularly wish to die on. There are a number of tournaments on the docket already that are geared towards both novices and regular teams and I frankly have very little interest in participating in them; on the other hand, I value the opportunity to play an MO or IO once in a while and I don't think these sets represent a waste of effort for either the writers or the players. We can easily tell Harding and NC State and everyone else to come to every one of those fall tournaments (by the way, you might want to add Yale's event to that list) and then in the winter/spring go play Penn Bowl and Regionals and SCT and whatever else goes down around that time, and they'll never have to see a grizzled dinosaur other than as a reader. And if they do want to come to an MO or IO, they can do so with the understanding that yes, those tournaments are open and will feature old people; deal with it.

Cheynem wrote:Well, many tournaments have the benefits of promoting a strong collegiate circuit, retention of new players/new teams, etc.

I am sympathetic to the idea that contributing members of the quizbowl community should be allowed to play a few tournaments. This is one reason why every summer tournament is open. I guess I am okay with like 1-2 open tournaments during the school year. But the talk of a Minnesota Open, an Illinois Open (is this actually happening?), a Chicago "hard" tournament which if is like Sack of Antwerp is open, and this "Maryland Open" is way too much. We cannot keep producing these open sets while seeing ripple effects on the collegiate circuit.

I don't understand what is so different about playing against an opponent who is enrolled in a degree program versus playing against an opponent who is not enrolled in a degree program.

Sure, some open players are scary. Many are not, and every year the scariness gap decreases. State College A or Matt Jackson are much more terrifying than Laferbrook.

My point is not rooted in the "It is too scary to play players not in school," it's more in the "what kind of circuit do we want to see?" I totally agree that there are many players and teams that are better that are in college than players who show up to play open things. But Matt Weiner is correct in saying, "hey, if you lose to VCU or UVA or Harvard, you are losing to a team that is like you, composed of people in college, and at least in these program's cases, in fact, feature primarily undergraduates as their prime scorers." You are promoting a circuit in which teams of students from a particular college play each other in the vast majority of tournaments. It is less sensical to see you play (win or lose) teams composed of people not in college who do not represent a particular school. At this level, you are promoting a circuit which places more emphasis on the individual player.

Now, some caveats. I believe Jerry would agree that the "the vast majority of tournaments" should feature "teams of students from a particular college playing each other" (at least I hope so). I am in favor of a few open tournaments that do not feature this (all of the summer tournaments, 2 or so during the regular school year). I fear that any more during the regular school year tips the conception of what we believe the circuit to be. Of course, as Ryan has argued several times, perhaps this is NOT what people want the circuit to be in the first place, so maybe we need to discuss that too.

But I just want to clarify that I am not operating on a "delicate flower" model for young/new teams on the circuit. I want them to play very good teams like UVA or teams laden with grad students like Chicago. But I also want them playing teams like them: college students.

Mike Cheyne"He has a PhD in SUBURBAN STUDIES!"--Marshall SteinbaumFormerly at University of MinnesotaHSAPQ Vice-President of Talent Relations

Cheynem wrote:Now, some caveats. I believe Jerry would agree that the "the vast majority of tournaments" should feature "teams of students from a particular college playing each other" (at least I hope so). I am in favor of a few open tournaments that do not feature this (all of the summer tournaments, 2 or so during the regular school year). I fear that any more during the regular school year tips the conception of what we believe the circuit to be. Of course, as Ryan has argued several times, perhaps this is NOT what people want the circuit to be in the first place, so maybe we need to discuss that too.

Sure, I agree with all those things (I believe those are direct quotes from me anyway); I just don't think that open tournaments "tip" the conception of what "we" want the circuit to be in any real sense just because I'm not sure that I agree that there's a well-defined notion of what "we" want. There are certainly a number of different people posting in this thread, many of whom want different things.

Mike wrote:But the talk of a Minnesota Open, an Illinois Open (is this actually happening?), a Chicago "hard" tournament which if is like Sack of Antwerp is open, and this "Maryland Open" is way too much.

Argh, once again, not a "Maryland Open." I'm independently putting together a set with the dual goals of reversing some recent negative trends and marginally increasing the likelihood that I'll be able to buy food next year. I happen to go to Maryland, whose usual rate of regular tournament output (1/year) and mirroring (a bazillion/year) are not going to be affected in any way. Seriously, stop categorizing this tournament with Sack of Antwerp, MO, and IO; the only time those things appeared in anything I said was when I was pointing out the myriad ways this event would NOT be like them. THUNDER this year happened to allow non-students to play, and in fact did so in a way (CMU staff member Jerry teaming up with the CMU team) I likely wouldn't even allow at my tournament.

People should stop making their events hard as balls, and eligibility restrictions have fuck all to do with that. I absolutely agree we don't need a host of CO level opens or more than a few harder-than-regionals level opens during the year. As Jerry alludes to, we've had schedules with those kind of events in the recent past (IO was often in the fall, MLK was exactly that kind of harder but not even close to impossible open event up until 3 or so years ago, there was Cardinal Classic for a few years, the list goes on and on); I don't think they had any kind of negative impact on quizbowl at all. Seriously, the first tournament I ever played was like 2007 MLK, a Westbrook-penned affair that was totally not easy and which I played with other first year players against squads like Chicago A, Yaphe and friends, Matt and Pat Freeburn, and Eric Hilleman's Retirement community. Was this visiting some kind of evil on the world? We DO need to shore up the roster of regular season tournaments, and I'm pleased to hear that Yale's and UVA's events will be adding to the roster this year. If we could couple this with a return to a standard where in-year tournaments that have open eligibility rules were not abusively hard, I think we'd see no ill effects at all - and indeed, many positive ones - from allowing valuable and contributing non-students like Jerry to participate in a few of them.

Mike wrote:We cannot keep producing these open sets while seeing ripple effects on the collegiate circuit

If you want to talk about a third of our season's events being prohibitively difficult, I will readily agree that it's a serious problem we need to correct (in fact, that's one of the main things I'm trying to do). If you want to claim that by writing an accessible tournament that allows non-students to participate as field-appropriate teams, I'm inflicting some kind of damaging "ripple effects" on the circuit, well, I call complete bullshit on that. I'd also like to know what I've ever done to justify an event I literally announced as being aimed at reeling in difficulty being lumped in with the hardest sets of the year. There are plenty of critiques one can make about my writing, but being a part of this canon-expansion fetishism that's gripped recent sets is absolutely not one of them.

Plenty of times, college teams simply use mid-season open tournaments as another chance to play with their normal ACF lineup. At Minnesota Open 2009, Chicago, Harvard, and Illinois (and probably a few other teams) all showed up as normal. Heck, Minnesota even showed up to Chicago Open as boring old Minnesota A a few times, despite the chance to form new and exciting superteams that was available to all of them.

I'm happy you are producing a regular difficulty quality set (I liked Terrapin a lot this year). I don't see you as part of a "canon-expansion fetishism" cargo cult--I actually enjoy your writing a great deal. I certainly didn't mean to call you out like you are some kind of archvillian in this regard.

I agree with you that shoring up regular difficulty tournaments and eliminating the balls-difficult hard tournaments are very good ideas. Yes, exactly. I completely agree with you that people writing tournaments should not use the mindset that these questions are intended for "good masters teams, so I must stump Jerry or Jonathan" (as sometimes I got the impression that IO perhaps was intending to do). I agree with you that yeah, some open tournaments are okay, which can be a bit harder (although not balls hard) and allow folks like Jerry and friends to play--you use the example of MLK and Cardinal Classic, etc. The modern day equivalents are perhaps Minnesota Open and Illinois Open or whatever.

I do disagree with you (or am skeptical) that your tournament, which seems like an admirable regular difficulty tournament, benefits from allowing people not in college to play. I thought THUNDER and Terrapin, to name a few, were way too lax with their eligibility restrictions--I don't know, maybe you have stricter rules regarding out of college play for your tournament, which might remedy this. But I personally am uncomfortable to see tournaments specifically geared for collegiate teams/players in which teams of people not in college win or dramatically affect the outcome of the tournament (and I'm not just BSing here, I've heard complaints from people on collegiate teams that they were similarly put out, which might suggest a sort of ripple effect). Open/masters players should be playing the open tournaments (as Jerry admits, he seems more interested in harder tournaments anyway and not events geared for regular teams).

Again, Jerry makes the good point that I am making assumptions about what kind of circuit quizbowl wants. I freely admit this is true and if we need to discuss this further, great.

Mike Cheyne"He has a PhD in SUBURBAN STUDIES!"--Marshall SteinbaumFormerly at University of MinnesotaHSAPQ Vice-President of Talent Relations

Back when I was a novice undergraduate, open teams would regularly play at ACF Regionals and other technically non-open tournaments. Heck, one year there was even an open team at SCT! They were referred to as "exhibition teams" and they were ineligible to win the tournament or play in the finals, even if they had the best record. And it was no big deal, it didn't scare anyone away. Heck, half the times the exhibition teams weren't even all that good.

I don't have a huge stake in this discussion, because regardless of what community consensus the West Coast is still going to have 4-10 team fields at every tournament that even exists next year.

EACNEFTACF FallUVA/Michigan tournamentDelta BurkeYale tournament

TerrapinPenn BowlSCTACF RegionalsMUTICTACF Nationals

See what I did there? That is a schedule of 13 events completely reserved for college teams. For a regular college team, we can point to thirteen events and say, "these are events that college teams play; you should play them." For a totally novice team with limited funds, we can clearly point to five tournaments: EACN, ACF Fall, Delta Burke, SCT D2, and MUT, and say, "These are the tournaments that you absolutely need to come to, though we'd like to see you at the other ones." [Brief edit: I am under the assumption that EFT will stay at its novice-friendly-but-still-harder-than-novice-level difficulty, which means it's a potentially good baseline for "regular difficulty" and thus should be a "regular college tournament"]

What's the point here? The point is that there are two clear "breaks" in the schedule: March, which covers pretty much every school's spring break, and May, which is during many schools' finals and right before the big high school nationals. Both of these seem like prime times for opens, since the people who want to play in these tournaments aren't necessarily bound by the schedules of their schools.

Secondly, Delta Burke traditionally takes place in mid-to-late November. Delta Burke is also a novice tournament that really shouldn't be played by the best teams. I don't see anything wrong, except perhaps staffing concerns, with combining Delta Burke and Minnesota Open into a single tournament with two divisions, "open" and "regular," playing on two different packet sets.

So really, if you think about it, we have about four or five "open tournament" slots across the calendar: one of the March weekends that doesn't work for the local MUT mirror due to spring breaks (proposed Chicago Nationals prep slot), early-to-mid-May (I'm off-the-cuff proposing moving the Chris Ray tournament here), July (Chicago Open), August (proposed VCU Open/Novice or replacement slot), [November (proposed Minnesota Open slot with "regular" division on Delta Burke set)]. I don't think that having five events at which we tell schools, "you can play these, but be aware that these events aren't regular college events and will feature people who aren't in school anymore" will prohibit circuit growth when (a) there are thirteen other events they ought to be going to anyway, which maybe it's my West Coast apathy but that seems a high enough number, and (b) most of those tournaments are taking place when it's difficult to get a true college field.

I think this makes sense scheduling-wise, ought to satisfy everyone arguing on one side or the other of this thread, and fits in every tournament announced thus far for the upcoming year. Maybe I'm just crazy idealistic, but what do other people think?